Black auk down

When Gretel Ehrlich was struck by lightning her heart stopped and started again by itself. Something in that experience drove her to spend the next seven years commuting between her ranch in Wyoming and the Arctic wastes of Greenland. Pitting your survival against blizzards, melting ice and a diet of raw seal's liver, seems to me a strange way of mending a damaged heart and shocked psyche, but there's no denying the lure of the polar North.

Even that redoubtable realist Dr Johnson succumbed, devoting two of his Rambler essays to the legends of the Greenlanders, and dreaming of seeing for himself the sparkling, towering icebergs and spouting whales. Therein - in that stripped and elemental landscape - lies the hope that true wisdom can be attained, far from the clutter and distractions of a literate civilisation.

If only. The arrival of alcohol, television and snowmobiles is destroying the Inuit way of life; a semi-nomadic, hunting society in which the word for weather, Sila, also means "consciousness", and whose language contains dozens of words relating to "ice": rime frost, freshwater ice, sea ice, ice on the inside of the tent, solid ice attached to the shore, hummocky ice, pieces of floating ice, icebergs in the water. It is of vital importance to know whether you are travelling across pack ice or new ice, as Ehrlich discovers.

She cadges a lift on an ageing Sikorsky helicopter to reach the isolated villages of Greenland's northern coast where she meets angakoks (the shamans of Inuit culture), drum dancers and communities who still live by hunting on dogsleds and with harpoons (Uummannaq, for example, has a population of 1,400 people and 6,000 dogs). Launching off on to the pack ice in search of auks, narwhals and polar bears, she almost drowns when her sled careers on to new ice and is saved only by her hunting companions, whose instincts for survival have been honed by centuries of learning how to endure an environment that yields virtually no vegetation and for most of the year is enveloped either in total darkness or total light.

Her book intermingles the stories she discovers with those recorded by Knud Rasmussen, the Danish-Inuit explorer, who in the 1920s set out to find and record true Eskimo life from Greenland to Siberia. He died in 1933 of salmonella poisoning after eating a big bowl of kivioq - dead auks sewn up in a seal's gut and left to rot for two months. Undeterred, Ehrlich eats the Arctic delicacy with relish. She spends a winter in Uummannaq - four months of no sunlight from 24 October until Sun Day, 4 February, when the sun shyly appears but retreats again after just six minutes - discovering that "boredom can be a friend".

Not everyone is so resourceful. One Dane, presumably sent to Greenland on government business, became so bored that he wrote up his diary six months ahead but died before his entries came to an end. Inuit life was never a utopian paradise; and infanticide, murderous "love" vendettas and cannibalism were as prevalent as that enviable happiness born of nothing. And yet there is something magical about the idea of becoming hardened to the rigours - and lushness - of existence, far from the incessant hum of ultimately fruitless busy-ness. We may occasionally get lost in a blizzard of words as Ehrlich tries to recapture the wondrous beauty of sun reflecting on ice, but her enthusiasm is infectious and her indomitable determination to make a record of a culture under threat is admirable. Who would not wish to listen to the groaning of ice moving against ice, "to be alive and on a dogsled in Greenland"?